Four times painting

Abstract

Four Times Painting focused on the work of four contemporary New Zealand artists, who each critically engage with the history and practice of painting. Acknowledging painting as a medium that had come back into critical focus, the exhibition enlarged on this medium’s current situation and considered how painters engaged with its history, purpose, and material practices. Curated by Christina Barton, Four Times Painting featured the work of Simon Ingram, Julian Dashper, Isobel Thom and Shane Cotton, four artists whose works can be approached as complex and multilayered meditations on painting’s relation to time. Simon Ingram’s works critically examine a history of painting’s relation to technology. This exhibition featured his ‘painting assemblages’ that used robotic technology to paint themselves and thus drew attention to the ‘performance’ of painting, and his ‘automata paintings,’ whose complex grid formations are built by using a methodology derived from the self-organising systems of artificial life.